Family Ministry Blog Heat Of The Moment
Heat Of The Moment
Written by Kevin Humphries Tuesday, 20 October 2009
With our F@H: The Good Fight event coming up on November 15, I wanted to post some thoughts Jeff King and I put down a while back on being Transitional Parents - Parents of pre-teens and teens. This is the first of 3 that I will post between now and this F@H event. Obviously, the names have been changed to protect the innocent.
Lisa sat in our office one morning crying out of absolute frustration over her high school age daughter, Samantha. Report cards had come out a few weeks earlier and Sam had failed two classes, and failure was unacceptable to Lisa and her husband, Richard. Not only was Sam showing a lack of responsibility and lying about doing her homework, but she was putting her college career in danger. When Lisa saw the report card, she immediately grounded Sam from going out with her friends until she brought her grades above passing. And to make sure she could focus on her studies, Lisa took away Sam’s cell phone. In her mind, Sam was spending too much time socializing and not enough time studying.You might be able to guess what Lisa told us next. Over the next few weeks Sam’s grades actually got worse! It was as if she was locked in a battle of wills with her mother, and the first one to cave in would be declared the loser. Lisa wanted her daughter’s grades to improve, but her reaction to the report card only made things worse. If she relaxed the punishment on Sam, maybe her daughter would return the favor by improving her grades. But if Lisa cracked first, then she would lose some control over her daughter. And if she did give Sam back some of her social privileges and the grades did not improve, what could she do then? Sam would win, nothing would be accomplished and things would be worse off than before. To Lisa, it wasn’t about beating her daughter at the game. She didn’t have to, or even want to win. But she was afraid of what the consequences would be if she lost. Lisa was stuck.
With all of this winning and losing, it starts to sound like raising an adolescent is a sporting competition or a battle. Didn’t it start out as a relationship? Isn’t it still a relationship? Do people actually win or lose in a relationship, or is it really about two people working together to achieve a common goal? Moms and dads do their best to work together to raise a child. Sometimes these same people can forget that the child is a part of the relationship, too. She plays on the same team and strives for the same goals as you do…even when she’s a teenager.
If raising a teenager is still about a relationship, when did the battle lines get drawn? To be sure, both parties are to blame most of the time, but adolescents often take their relational cues from you, the parent. They look to you to set the mood and expectation of the situation. If you are calm, most of the time they will react more calmly. If you are furious and start yelling, there’s a good chance they will get just as mad and just as loud.
Many parents we’ve talked to have been in situations just like Lisa. Their adolescent does something that sets them off, the punishment is levied and the result is tension, stress and increased frustration. Upon reflection, most parents feel that they acted too impulsively or too emotionally, in the heat of the moment. Our worst enemy when it comes to having great relationships is reacting emotionally. If they could do it all over again, many parents would do less yelling and might actually make the consequences match the offense. Lisa reflected on Sam’s grounding and decided that a punishment of mandatory tutoring after school would have been more appropriate. Then Sam couldn’t lie about not doing her homework because she would be doing it with her teacher, her grades would improve and she would still be losing quality social time without a total exile.
How do you keep from reacting so emotionally to your adolescent who does exactly what you tell them not to do or does something so ludicrous you are almost speechless? After all, it’s almost impossible to foresee every situation your teenager might invent or stumble into. Few people expect to be driving home from a quick trip to the grocery store, only to pass their 15 year-old son out joyriding in their other car.
There are two key elements to transitioning from a parent who reacts emotionally to one who responds sensibly. The first element is to take a pause. The first reaction many of us have when we find our kids doing something we think or know they shouldn’t be doing is extremely emotional. Our instincts tell us to act on this emotion immediately. Not always the best idea. Instead, take a breath. Use the old count to ten. Take a moment to process this emotion. If we take the time to process the emotion, then we can put it in its proper context and move on to other options for responding to our children. Keep in mind that when you confront your children about something they're doing wrong, chances are they already know it’s wrong. They will be emotional. If you, as the parent, can take a moment to process your emotions instead of reacting to them, you have a far greater chance of keeping them under control as well as the situation.
The second element is one of the cornerstones of Transitional Parenting: Know your limits. Another way to say this is to know what is important to you, what characteristics you consider essential for a responsible decision-making adult to possess, what life skills you want your children as adults to possess. The thing that surprises most parents when we ask them to describe their limits, they can’t verbalize them. They have limits, and they know what they are, but they have a hard time communicating them. The reason there is such a difficulty in communicating limits is few people have actually sat down and taken the time to define them. Taking the time to define your limits before they are approached by your teens will help keep you from reacting emotionally. Setting limits is not about keeping your teenager in line and making sure they follow rules. It’s about communicating to them what is important to you.
Think about it this way. If you decide to take the family on a vacation to Disney World, which of the two scenarios is the most responsible? Would you wake up one morning, pack you bags, drive to the airport to look for an available flight to Orlando, and hope there is a vacancy at a nearby hotel? Or would you plan the trip, booking the flight, hotel, meal plans, admission tickets and rental car ahead of time? Obviously, the least frustrating option is the second one. The same idea is true for setting limits for your teens. What do you consider important? What is allowable and acceptable for your child? Take some time to write down what your limits are, what you feel is essential and important. Here are a few topics to help get you started:
Dating
Personal Responsibility
Sex
Friends
Driving
Curfew
Academic Expectations/School Work
(We know. We gave you the easy ones to start with!)
If you set your limits ahead of time, and you communicate them to your son or daughter, then you are more prepared to respond to him or her when they start to push against them. You are prepared to deal with the temptation to react emotionally. When you, as the parent, remove as much of the emotion as possible, you are in control of the situation. By responding with the logic and rationale that comes from planning ahead, you are able to help your adolescent process their emotions as well. They may still choose to react out of frustration and emotion. But you cannot control how they might react. You can control how you respond, and by planning ahead and establishing your limits early on, you set the stage for future situations and expectations. You also give yourself the opportunity to provide a consequence that reflects your limit instead of one born out of passion. When you give yourself this opportunity, you significantly reduce the guilt you could feel from punishing your adolescent out of anger or emotion, and the desire to win or lose the battle becomes a non-issue.
A few weeks after our first conversation, Lisa came back to us and told us about her follow-up conversation with Sam. She apologized to her daughter for reacting so emotionally, but communicated to her the importance of good grades. She lessened the severity of her punishment, but told Sam the trade-off would be mandatory after school tutoring until her grades improved. Sam wasn’t ecstatic with the new arrangement, but understood what her mom said. It’s hard to totally remove emotion entirely from these situations with your teens, and you shouldn’t try to do that. It’s good to have emotions and to get passionate about your parenting. The key is to not let that passion get in the way of recognizing and communicating your expectations and limits.
